Copyright Notice

The 2008 update of the Philosopher's Lexicon is a bit exasperating. A
preliminary concern is that the treatment of continental figures
continues to be shabby -- contemptuous and dismissive.

Perhaps a bit more distressing is the PL's continued heavy slant toward a certain generation of philosophers. It's hard to find a philosopher
on the list born much after 1950 (the sole exception I find being
Neander, with Korsgaard and Shapiro born in '52 and '51, respectively).

This isn't plausibly due to the unlikeliness of a philosopher's doing
anything worthy of being immortalized in this way until their late 50s.
First, the previous edition of the PL was compiled in 1987. At the time,
only philosophers born before 1930 were that old, but there are plenty
of entries younger than that (Plantinga, AO Rorty, Searle, Stroud,
Block, Boyd, Chihara, Follesdal, Dennett, Parfit, Desousa, Donnellan,
Dretske, Dworkin, ... just to get through the Ds). And second, just to pull a few out of the sky,
surely
such entries as the following are as amusing and informative as many current entries: luddite (a philosopher who likes technology), side (an
aspect of a time-slice), William (a father of a necessary being), to
chalm (to control the behavior of a zombie), to leit (to control the
behavior of an academic discipline).

Much more credible as an explanation is that Dennett, the compiler of
the PL, was himself born in 1942, and the doctrines, peculiarities, and insider humor of philosophers after his generation have largely eluded his attention. Seen in this light, the PL as currently
constituted can be plausibly regarded as a (perhaps somewhat self-congratulatory) joke among
the members of Dennett's generation.

The top-heaviness of the PL might be thought to be not entirely without negative
consequences. It is natural for an undergraduate major or beginning grad
student to regard the PL as a guide to the stereotypical doctrines or styles of
the most important philosophers; absence from the list, by contrast, would signal
marginality. If so, the PL hegemonizes Dennett's generation and
marginalizes those who come afterward.

If the PL were a mere samizdat or internet barnacle collecter (deaths of
philosophers, breakup lines of philosophers, and the like), this would
not matter much or at all. But as published by Blackwell, the PL has a sort of
canonical status as capturing humorously the profession's
self-conception. While the 1987 version was an amusing relic or snapshot
of the field at the time, the 2008 update takes on a somewhat darker tone.

The "Readings" section of this month's Harper's magazine features an excerpt from 'Divine evil', a posthumous article by David Lewis, prepared from the Nachlass by Philip Kitcher. Kitcher has done a fine job of rendering Lewis's familiar prose style.

The central premiss of the argument is that -- since he damns the insubordinate to eternal torture -- the god of Christianity is far more evil than any earthly dictator. Worshiping such a god is thus far more evil than admiring, say, Hitler. Unfortunately, those who admire certain Christians, when admirable -- eg Mother Theresa -- also acquire a bit of evil vicariously; and so on. "Leaving aside those who find nothing admirable in humanity, everyone will be tainted with divine evil".

The conclusion manifests a dark streak in late papers by Lewis present also in the posthumous 'How many lives has Schroedinger's cat?' The depressing conclusion of that paper is that -- if quantum mechanics is correct in its fundamentals -- each of us is rationally bound to expect an eternal (earthly) life of extreme torment (without the assistance of the Christian god!).

More brightly, the back page "Findings" section (in which often speculative scholarly theses are juxtaposed, tersely and amusingly presented as fact) ends on a cheerfully Ludovician note: "All possible universes exist".

Unicef has just released a report assessing the well-being of children in the top 21 wealthiest countries (for which there is appropriate data; see below).

The [report] looks
at six dimensions of child well-being: material well-being, health and
safety, educational well-being, family and peer relationships,
behaviors and risks, and young people's own perceptions of their
well-being.

Both the U.S. and Britain were in the bottom two-thirds of five of the six categories, and came in dead last overall, by a considerable margin. The overall results:

(Note: Australia, Iceland, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, the Slovak Republic, South Korea, and Turkey were excluded due to lack of data).The U.S. came in last on health and safety:

While none of the countries studied can claim "mission
accomplished" in securing child well-being in every measurement, the
United States fared particularly poorly. It ranked last in health and
safety, primarily because of high rates of infant mortality, low birth
weight, and deaths from accidents and injuries.

No great surprise, given the persistent legacies of Reagan and Thatcher:

One of the study's researchers, Jonathan Bradshaw, said children fared
worse in the US and Britain -- despite high overall levels of national
wealth -- because of greater economic inequality and poor levels of
public support for families.

“What they have in common are very high levels
of inequality, very high levels of child poverty, which is also
associated with inequality, and in rather different ways poorly
developed services to families with children,” said Bradshaw, a
professor of social policy at the University of York in Britain.

“They
don’t invest as much in children as continental European countries do,”
he said, citing the lack of day care services in both countries and
poorer health coverage and preventative care for children in the U.S.

Cenk Uygur argues by analogy that those 25% of U.S.ers expecting the second coming in 2007 are certifiably insane:

Imagine for a second if instead of Jesus, some psycho was waiting for a
magical creature named Fred to come save him this year and suck him up
into the sky. Now, who doesn't think that man needs serious counseling
and perhaps medical supervision? Now, you change Fred into Jesus, and
you have 25% of the country.

In the comment thread Freespeach has an induction-based argument that even believers shouldn't believe this:

Jeezus is way too smart to come back in 2007, think about it.

He would probably just go out to speak at some some peace rally. Then
he would get arrested, be sent to GITMO with no trial (at least last
time he got a freakin trial) where he would be subjected to water
boarding and eventually have his balls stomped on.

Would you come back? No.

Jezzus ain't stupid, Mary didn't raise no fool.

Like it says on those funky bracelets, what would Jesus do?

Jeezus would get the hell out of the USA and fast. This country just
isn't tolerant enough for a dude like Jesus. Too bad we could use his
help.

British,
American and German unions are to forge a pact to challenge the power
of global capitalism in a move towards creating an international union
with more than 6 million members. [...]

Derek Simpson, general secretary of Amicus, said: 'Our aim is to create
a powerful single union that can transcend borders to challenge the
global forces of capital. I envisage a functioning, if loosely federal,
multinational organisation within the next decade.'

In the last years, and in the nature of the case, we've usually been the bearers of bad news; but alongside the many problems, the world is full of cool, interesting and/or (benignly) weird stuff. Hence we invite you to occasionally visit off the record to share a bit of what we come across. Happy holidays.

Last week, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology recommended
to those drafting the 2007 Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (also at
NIST) that voting systems be required to be "software independent".
Officially, that's a system such that "a previously undetected change
or error in its software [assuming it has such] cannot cause an
undetectable change or error in an election outcome". Unofficially,
that's a system with a voter-verified paper trail.

The take-home line from the report, concerning software-dependent Direct Record Electronic systems:

Potentially, a single programmer could “rig” a major election.

The problem is not just that DRE systems are presently insecure, but that there is no feasible way of making them secure:

[V]oting
systems in general are not developed according to rigorous models of
secure code development nor tested with the rigor of other
security-critical applications. Experts reject that even these measures
would be sufficient for reliably detecting all errors or malicious code
hidden in a voting systems.

Hence the need for a
software-independent audit trail. Of claims that software
independence isn't necessary since "there is no evidence of
intentionally-introduced malicious code or fraud in voting systems" and
"election procedures are effective at keeping voting systems free of
intentionally introduced fraud", the writers note

[These
claims] do not hold up against the enormous evidence of computer fraud
that has occurred in other areas of IT and that has or is likely to
occur in voting systems, given the billions spent on elections as well
as the rich history of electoral fraud.

Moreover, claims that everything is A-OK are suspect, given that
there isn't any way, independent of the system being tested, to check
the results. As Barbara Samorajczyk put it,
after conceding a House of Delegates seat to her marginally-ahead
opponent, "there wasn't any meaningful way to do a recount [...] we
cannot recount the machine". (Exit polls can do some work here, of course, but their results are approximate and subject to manipulation.)

The committee in charge of drafting the VVSG 2007 guidelines rejected
a proposal adopting the recommendation that all systems be required to
be software independent; however, they later unanimously accepted
a revised proposal which required that future systems be so. Existing
systems are to be "grandfathered in"; one hopes this doesn't mean Jenna
for Prez.

Overall this strikes me as very good news, even though VVSG 2007 is
still at the draft stage, and even though these guidelines (hence
"requirements") are voluntary. When word gets out about the need for
software independence those forced to vote on DRE machines will
rightfully raise hell with their state election officials and
representatives, and U.S.ers will slowly but surely free themselves
from this new form of tyranny.

Jimmy Carter must have known that even the title of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid would draw fire, in daring to implicate Israel in systematic racial oppression of Palestinians. But evidently he's had it up to here with this particular denial of the obvious, especially as perpetuated by his fellow Democrats:

[Good Morning America host] Robin Roberts told Carter that "many people find surprising that you
come down a little hard on Israel, and that there have been some key
Democrats who have distanced themselves a little bit from your view on
Israel."

"In fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said 'it is wrong to suggest
that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere
else that institutionalizes ethnically based suppression, and Democrats
reject that allegation vigorously,'" Roberts said. "What is your
response to that?"

"Well, Robin, I have spent the last 30 years trying to find peace
for Israel and Israel's neighbors, and the purpose of this book is to
do that," Carter responded. "But you can't find peace unless you
address the existing issues honestly and frankly."

Carter said that there was "no doubt now that a minority of Israelis
are perpetuating apartheid on the people in Palestine, the Palestinian
people."

[...]

Carter called Israel's occupation the "prime cause" of continuing violence in the Middle East.

"And contrary to the United Nations resolutions, contrary to the
official policy of the United States government, contrary to the
Quartet so-called road map, all of those things -- and contrary to the
majority of Israeli people's opinion -- this occupation and
confiscation and colonization of land in the West Bank is the prime
cause of a continuation of violence in the Middle East," said Carter.

"And what is being done to the Palestinians under Israeli domination
is really atrocious," Carter continued. "It's a terrible affliction on
these people."

In his book, Carter argues that "peace will come to Israel and the
Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with
international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American
policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens and honor its
own previous commitments by accepting its legal borders."

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field has written in calling attention to the following petition to the UCLA PD, concerning their recent public torture of a student by electric shock:

We condemn the recent excessive and unnecessary force used in the case
of the Iranian American student abused at the UCLA Powell Library. This
is a case of police brutality and warrants immediate action taken
against the police involved.

Apparently some UCLA cops were doing an ID check at a computer cluster last night; a student named
Mostafa Tabatabainejad didn't have his ID, and when the cops grabbed at Tabatabainejad to rush him out, he started loudly complaining. One thing led to another, and the cops ended up shocking Tabatabainejad with tasers five times, at least a few times because he wouldn't, or couldn't, stand up. This was all in full view of at least a dozen other students. Most of this was caught on video, which you can see here.

The cops' self-serving press release is here. Central claims in this press release are contradicted by the witness reports I cite above, but in any case, for chrissakes, why is anything Tabatabainejad did worthy of being tortured?

If you're interested in giving the folks at UCLA a piece of your mind:

This will lead to a very high level resignation -- any parent becoming aware of this torture video, and they will become aware of it, will fear that their kid will be the next victim of the renegade campus torture cops.

UPDATE: the cops compounded their intimidation by threatening to shock-torture bystanding kids asking for badge numbers -- according to the ACLU, this is an "illegal assault".

Between 100 and 150 staff and visitors were kidnapped this morning from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Scholarships and
Cultural Relations Directorate in the downtown Karradah district.

Iraq's higher education minister immediately ordered all
universities closed until security improvements are made, saying he was
''not ready to see more professors get killed.''

''I have only one choice which is to suspend classes at
universities. We have no other choice,'' Abed Theyab said in an address
to parliament.

Evidently the 80 or so gunmen, wearing blue camouflage uniforms of the type
worn by police commandos, had an easy time of it, closing off the surrounding streets and receiving no resistance from the 4 ministry guards. The neighborhood police chief is under investigation along with some of his
officers.

The abductions were the most brazen attack yet on Iraqi
academics, who have often been targeted by insurgents. Recent weeks
have seen a university dean and prominent Sunni geologist murdered,
bringing the death toll among educators to at least 155 since the war
began.

Thousands of professors and researchers have fled to
neighboring countries to escape the lawlessness and sectarian strife,
robbing the country of its brain trust.

The academics apparently were singled out for their relatively
high public stature, vulnerability and known views on controversial
issues in a climate of deepening Islamic fundamentalism.

CNN warehoused a stock of pink pixels to mark GOP pickups on thesethreepages. They haven't needed them yet -- but their logistics team was fully taxed in keeping the streams of baby blue flowing through the tubes of the internets.

This marks what, as Bill Montgomery notes, may turn out to be an extremely rare electoral outcome: while not every race in the midterm has been decided yet, it seems that no Democratic-held Senate or House seat or governorship was picked up by a Republican -- apparently such a shut out has never happened before.

A cheering reflection on the cultural underpinnings of the left blogosphere political movement. Especially cheering when read as a sort of "happy face" take on the value of bricolage in response to Thomas Frank's depressing doctrine of the context of cool. Also most excellently proceeding from the core Lennon-ist exhortation to "try something new".

Vids: goodnatured people and one fucking psycho. (Though I note that Big Time manifests a bit of stung-ness in response to a huge dis from his long time bud Ken Adelman.)

There's a good deal to read on the incredibly hilarious "101st fighting keyboarders fuckup" reported by the Times over the weekend; most cheering is that Bush considered it a pet project and even engaged in a bit of sympathetic interpretative prediction of the predicted reaction to the sweet cherries that the 101st would pluck from his document treasure trove: "Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people
who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released
sooner. "If I knew then what I know now," Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, "I would have been more supportive of the war." " Note that this anecdote is from last March's Weekly Standard! [Backstory; more: apparently Laurie Mylroie and some other crazies, worried about the evaporating WMD justification for the Iraq invastion, enlisted PowerLine's moronic "Big Trunk" Mirengoff and others in pressuring a pair of congressmen to pressure Bush to pressure Bush's third CIA boss, Negroponte, to release 2 million pages of captured Iraqi docs on line, against standard intel procedure (and fucking boneheaded common sense!). Or something like that. The goal was for an "army of Davids" -- in InstaIgnorance's asinine phrase -- to open-source translate them out of Arabic to provide the retrospective propaganda that would induce the war critics to shut up. Because we know how the right wing blogosphere is so knowledgeable about other cultures and so public spirited. For months, the IAEA was warning the Cheney Admin to take the docs down since they tell you in detail in Arabic how to build a nuke, info that the IAEA suppressed from the public for decades -- until last March. Needless to say, the Cheneyites paid no attn until the NYT broke the story over the weekend. The national security party at work. I've been rotflmao all weekend!]

A very cool formula to predict the outcome of a given congressional race without polls.

The Clinton folk wargamed an Iraq takeover in 1999 and predicted that even with 400K troops, the likely outcome would be chaos. Rummy's New Model Army tried to do it with a third of that. Result? Chaos! (Incidentally, I've never seen a decent explanation of just why Rummy digs the light military so much. Maybe his thought is just as straightforward as this: with the same manpower a light military can fuck up a lot more places than a heavy military.)

Excellent! Daniel Ortega, a true peoples' hero, appears poised to make his comeback. Caveat: he used to be a Good Guy, overthrowing one of the more vicious Central American caudillos, and valiantly stood up for years against a ruinous US proxy war, dunno what he's been up to these days.

Oh, couldn't it have been predicted. In the face of the coming Democratic onslaught (more of a motivation, evidently, than the ongoing Iraqi slaughter) many big-name cheerleaders for the war on Iraq have suddently gone anti-war, anti-Bush, and more generally anti-Republican. Three days ago, invasion evangelists Sullivan and Hitchens outdid each other in overt sneering at Bush, having special fun with Bush's claim that things were going "fantastic" in Iraq, with Hitchens suggesting that Bush is a hallucinating incompetent, and Sullivan saying that Bush's claim indicated that he was "unhinged" and had "lost his mind". Hitchens, coming out strong with his lee to port, rejected his characterization as a "conservative", stating that he "has no [dinner?--ed.] party affiliation"; Sullivan advised voters to take Bush's failure into account and indeed, spoke of the election as "an intervention".

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not
have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and
had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into
Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider
other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most,
which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'

Not that Perle et al. disclaim their PNAC policies, of course. The fault lies in the implementation, you see: they just didn't count on Bush's [sic] admin being so incompetent, nor on the viciousness of the resistance. Neo-cons don't seem to realize that such extrinsic failures don't get them off the hook; even putting aside the ludicrous and murderous tenets of the PNAC agenda, neocons are specifically responsible for the disaster in Iraq in their vision of invasion's failing to incorporate the likely contingencies.

Here is the text of the editorial, an advance copy of which we received this afternoon.

----------------

Time for Rumsfeld to go

"So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused
and informed public opinion ... it is necessary to tell the hard
bruising truth."

That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.

But until recently, the "hard bruising" truth about the Iraq war has
been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington. One rosy
reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice
President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "mission
accomplished," the insurgency is "in its last throes," and "back off,"
we know what we're doing, are a few choice examples.

Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired
generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines,
inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should
have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought
the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors.

Now, however, a new chorus of criticism is beginning to resonate.
Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the
war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate
Armed Services Committee in September: "I believe that the sectarian
violence is probably as bad as I've seen it ... and that if not
stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war."

Last week, someone leaked to The New York Times a Central Command briefing slide
showing an assessment that the civil conflict in Iraq now borders on
"critical" and has been sliding toward "chaos" for most of the past
year. The strategy in Iraq has been to train an Iraqi army and police
force that could gradually take over for U.S. troops in providing for
the security of their new government and their nation.

But despite the best efforts of American trainers, the problem of
molding a viciously sectarian population into anything resembling a
force for national unity has become a losing proposition.

For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training
the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of
national identity, are only in it for the money, don't show up for duty
and cannot sustain themselves.

Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.

And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.

Now, the president says he'll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.

This is a mistake.

It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has
failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break
publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is
losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.

These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many
privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private,
adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of
subordination of the military to civilian authority.

And although that tradition, and the officers' deep sense of honor,
prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe
it.

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with
the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy
has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the
blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the
troops who bear its brunt.

This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party
wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard
bruising truth:

The Decider annoyed a lot of people with his dog-whistle claim that Iraq's current descent into chaos will in the fullness of time look like a historical "comma". I've concluded he's right: human atrocities at nearly any level of badness look exceedingly trivial in comparison to the end of fish -- apparently on schedule to occur some time in my seventies. The benign and familiar, relaxing and graceful, beautiful and tasty fish, metaphor for revolutionary organizing, occupant of our planet for half a billion years, incubator of the bone, is -- if present trends continue -- on the way out, as a result of a mere 100 years of superexploitation, or so sez a team of fancy scientists. (I got the impression their focus was merely on fishing, and didn't account for, e.g., the acidification of the seas due to increases in atmospheric CO2, which imperils shellfish and their plankton; so my armchair estimate is that the collapse could occur even faster. But what do I know.)

Half a billion years is about 10% of the age of the earth -- hard to miss on a really big historical scale; by comparison humans have been around for what, .01% of the age of the earth, and the industrial assault on fish doesn't show up until the seventh decimal place.

The good news: protecting fisheries can bring their populations back, and at present "only" about 30% of species are in a "state of collapse" (at 10% or less of natural populations). One hopes that around Jan 2009 there will be a US govt with priorities that are not utterly insane, and thinking people of the world will start to organize to prevent this calamity.

Backstory: the "endlessly hypocritical" Joe Lieberman reported $387K in undifferentiated "petty cash" expenditures in his September campaign expense disclosure. Petty cash is by FEC ruling limited to 100 bucks or under. What a huge lot of burgers and gas fillups that is! By comparison Ned spent under $500 in the same period (no cite, I don't recall where exactly I saw that latter figure). Also such disbursements are to be carefully itemized. So Joe's breaking the law. For a while, the story languished in the press.

Now apparently the CT press is getting on the stick. That's great. The most reasonable suspicion is that the missing $387K has gone for machine-politics style "street money". As the just cited blogger puts it, "street money is wrong. The public knows that instinctively"; so that if word gets out to the general public, "it would tank his campaign".

Talk about reaction formation! This story is a real treat for lovers of one of Brian's favorite concepts. Apparently Ted Haggard, one of the fathers of the contemporary American Taliban, and the major player behind the theocratization of the USAF (his megachurch is right across from the Air Force Academy), has been involved in a sexual relationship with a male prostitute for the last three years, apparently also engaging in "p&p" or enhancing the experience by smoking crystal. Dude, stay off the crystal, that stuff will make your teeth fall out. UPDATE: I first learned about Haggart in a Harper's story last year -- I'm now reminded of the most kitchily theoerotic big paintings they have hanging in the lobby. Click the link, they're hysterical.

Why is Stanford University, my alma mater, the lying right-wing propagandist ThomasSowell -- who has recently lied about the anti-terrorism positions of a leading member of California's congressional delegation? Answer, Sowell a "fellow" -- translation, on a sinecure post -- at the Hoover Institution. Hoover certainly performs some worthwhile services -- eg their archives are tremendous. Still, providing Sowell and the even more odious and stupid Dinesh D'Souza with the sheen of a Stanford association damages Stanford's good name, as well as blurring the line in the public mind between serious scholarship and propaganda. (Incidentally, if you haven't yet read James Wolcott's devastating D'Souza dis, do so: it's archived here.) Financial pressure obviously won't do anything to get SU to disgorge this pair of goons: Hoover is self-funding -- or rather owned by the corporate and elite paymasters that benefit from its propaganda (ADM "supermarket to the world"; big oil and their auto buddies; big war; big FIRE; assorted individual plutocrats). Still, maybe moral pressure would induce Stanford, if not to pressure Hoover to get rid of these jerks, at least to issue a strong statement deploring their lies and distinguishing what they do from what Stanford is supposed to do. Maybe after the election ...

US determined to be an "extensive surveillance socieity", with privacy protections just above those of China, Russia, and Malaysia.

Last night I got round to reading Matt Taibbi's terrifying Rolling Stone piece on the historically dreadful 109th congress. If you haven't read it yet, please do. I found I learned a great deal about legislative mechanics -- also, in grueling detail, how the Republican party has utterly destroyed this central system in US democracy.

In a state in Mexico with little money, and not much of that going to
public services, teachers hold their annual strike for better wages and
against the imposition of fees on children who go to school.

The state government is less tractable this year, and has police attack
the teacher's encampment on the zocalo in Oaxaca. The teachers,
without guns, repel this attack.

A huge, loose network of popular groups pledge solidarity with the
teachers, and the central demand of the movement - a demand supported
by the majority of people in the state - becomes the resignation or
removal of the corrupt governor.

At the same time, they begin setting up new forms of self-government,
many directly based on or inspired by indigenous forms of local
self-government, and creating a democratic coalition called the APPO,
to push for broad changes in state and local government to begin
respecting, and meeting the needs, of the population, which is majority
indigenous and where many have long been excluded from exercising power
and left in poverty.

The state government, while ceasing to function in almost all normal
respects, wages a low-intensity dirty war against the rebellious
population through police officers in plain clothes and, well, thugs.
They kill at least thirteen people over the course of the half-year
since the people's uprising began, and the government ceased to
function (while the governor who precipitated the rebellion refuses to
leave). Meanwhile, the protesters, who have put up barricades in the
city of Oaxaca to fend off these attacks, kill no one.

A central part of the struggle, from the start, is control of and
access to information. The police destroyed the teacher's small mobile
radio station in the initial attack, and student allies soon began
broadcasting from a public university. Supporters of the movement took
over a number of government and commercial radio stations, and while
state and private security forces have struck back and knocked some
stations off the air, the movement is giving voice to a people long
excluded from public conversation.

The thirteenth person that the ruling PRI-affiliated attackers kill is
an independent, activist journalist from the United States, Brad Will
of Indymedia. Days later, the Mexican federal government sends
militarized police into the state. They do not go after the murderers,
but instead use tanks and force to try to dislodge the nonviolent
social movements from the city of Oaxaca. At least one boy is killed
by a federal police tear-gas canister.

This
disaster has been going on for months, but only recently have a couple
of reports shown up in the U.S. media (no doubt because the violent
invasion has caused Mexican stocks and the peso to drop); as per usual the reporting (see this article
by Mark Stevenson) is misleading in the extreme. You know the routine
by now. First, follow the "he said she said" blueprint---in
particular, for God's sake, don't explicitly contrast the number (in
the dozens) of (relatively) wealthy elite bemoaning the lack of tourist
income with the number (in the thousands) of protesters willing to put
their lives on the line today for a decent and unharrassed life in the
future. Second, leave out crucial information---in particular, don't
say who was responsible for the killing of Brad Will, which killing is
being cited as grounds for "stopping the violence" by sending in the
riot troops. Third, last but not least, paint the protesters (appropriate subtext intact, of course) as crazed
wackos, silly kids, and Dark Others on a tear:

The protests began as a teachers strike but quickly spiraled into chaos
as anarchists, students and Indian groups seized the plaza and
barricaded streets to demand Ruiz's ouster.

This video
of the invasion tells a more accurate story. Cast your eye upon the
row upon row of Darth Vaderian riot police, inexorably marching down
upon the unarmed and unresisting protestors, beating their shields with
their clubs in unison and backed up by a row of tank-like vehicles each as
big as a two-story house. We've seen those outfits before, of course,
in Palestine, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and elsewhere where those
in power have realized that when metal meets flesh, the laws of physics
are typically on their side.

Among the more pathetic scenes are women pleading with the riot
police ("No puedes massacre a su jente!"---"You can't massacre your
people!"). These pleadings seemed to have little impact, perhaps
because, following recent global trend, the "police" might well be
mercenaries who could care less about the people they are violently
oppressing. Still, for the moment, the thugs at least are human.
Imagine what protest will be like when their jobs get outsourced---in
five, ten years?---to robots of war.

In a series of experiments, the elephants first explored the mirror
-- reaching behind it with their trunks, kneeling before it and even
trying to climb it -- gathering clues that the mirror image was just
that, an image.

That was followed by an eerie sequence in which
the animals made slow, rhythmic movements while tracking their
reflections. Then, like teenagers, they got hooked.

All three
conducted oral self-exams. Maxine, a 35-year-old female, even used the
tip of her trunk to get a better look inside her mouth. She also used
her trunk to slowly pull her ear in front of the mirror so she could
examine it -- "self-directed" behaviors the zookeepers had never seen
before.

Moreover, one elephant, Happy, 34, passed the most
difficult measure of self-recognition: the mark test. The researchers
painted a white X on her left cheek, visible only in the mirror. Later,
after moving in and out of view of the mirror, Happy stood directly
before the reflective surface and touched the tip of her trunk to the
mark repeatedly -- an act that, among other insights, requires an
understanding that the mark is not on the mirror but on her body.

This is pretty extraordinary. Besides bottle-nosed dolphins (who
also use mirrors to perform self-examinations), elephants are the only
non-apes to exhibit such behavior.

Max and I have a philosophy: We believe that
you know how to spend your money far better than the federal government
does. (Applause.) We believe that when you have more of your own money
in your pocket to save, spend or invest, the economy benefits.
(Applause.) Democrats believe they can spend your money better than you
can. So over the past five years we have acted on our philosophy and
passed the largest tax relief since Ronald Reagan was in the White
House. (Applause.)
In other words, we just didn't talk about philosophy -- there's too many
philosophers in Washington -- we acted. We got the job done.

Paraguay is a landlocked country in South America, with a population of 6 million. It's one of the least densely populated countries, and has a super-high Gini index. Back in the day, its economy was dominated by a small number of landlords, with big loads of the population squatting on the fringes of their huge estates. The Gini index (the standard measure of income inequality) is predictably high -- 56, by comparison the US is at 45, France at 32, Brazil at 59.

Sounds like a great place for disgraced dictators to hide out.

Apparently also the US has been planning to put up an air base near the
Bolivian gas fields, near to Mariscal Estigarribia, close to the
Brazilian and Bolivian borders.

An Argentine official regarded the
intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero
Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the
governments of the region.

Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the
Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced
by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a
98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.

The news circulated Thursday in non-official sources in Asuncion, Paraguay.

The good folks at the National Security Network need to update their North Korea page:

Under President Bush significant ground has been lost. When he took
office, North Korea was adhering to a negotiated freeze on plutonium
and may have possessed enough plutonium for one nuclear device. Since
then, North Korea may have more than quadrupled its stock of
weapons-grade plutonium and breached all previous constraints on its
program. Under the Bush administration, North Korea has expelled
international nuclear inspectors, withdrawn from the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, and produced enough new weapons-grade
plutonium for a number of nuclear weapons.

President Bush and Congress have largely neglected the issue of
North Korea’s nuclear program, presiding over a significant increase in
the threat to the United States and its allies. The administration has
rejected any effort to negotiate a freeze and instead insisted upon
immediate disarmament. The U.S. effort to create a multilateral
negotiating group — known as the six party talks — has been a total
failure. These nations have met only five times over four years and
produced no significant results, and North Korea is now boycotting the
discussions. The United States is seen by states in the region,
including China and South Korea, as contributing to the standoff by
having recently imposed increased measures to deter North Korean
counterfeiting operations, a secondary but important concern.

But the explosion was also the product of more than two decades of
diplomatic failure, spread over at least three presidencies. American
spy satellites saw the North building a good-size nuclear reactor in
the early 1980’s, and by the early 1990’s the C.I.A.
estimated that the country could have one or two nuclear weapons. But a
series of diplomatic efforts to “freeze” the nuclear program —
including a 1994 accord signed with the Clinton administration —
ultimately broke down, amid distrust and recriminations on both sides.

Three
years ago, just as President Bush was sending American troops toward
Iraq, the North threw out the few remaining weapons inspectors living
at their nuclear complex in Yongbyon, and moved 8,000 nuclear fuel rods
they had kept under lock and key.

Astounding that they're pre-emptively spreading blame to Clinton and being vague about the lines of causation. Clinton's "Agreed Framework" (in which Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear
programs", and in return, Washington agreed that the United States and
North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully
together and take steps to normalize their relations") was as successful as might be hoped for -- NK's nuclear program was on hold during the reign of Clinton. If the Agreed Framework "ultimately broke down", the causation is clear. In August 2002, Bush proclaimed to Woodward "I loathe Kim Jong Il. I've got a visceral reaction to this guy", calling Kim a "pygmy" -- shades of "fuck Saddam, I'm taking him out" -- which could not have possibly been lost on Dear Leader. Bush bizarrely included NK in the "Axis of Evil", then "just as" he proceeded to invade one of the members of this "Axis" -- lo and behold!, no one could have anticipated that! -- NK decided bargaining is no longer in their interest.

Moreover,
there's every reason to take Mr. Bush's viscera seriously. Under his
doctrine of pre-emption, the U.S. can attack countries it thinks might
support terrorism, whether or not they have actually done so. And who
decides whether we attack? Here's what Mr. Bush says: "You said we're
headed to war in Iraq. I don't know why you say that. I'm the person
who gets to decide, not you." L'état, c'est moi.

So Mr. Bush thinks you're a bad guy — and that makes you a potential target, no matter what you do.

On the other
hand, Mr. Bush hasn't gone after you yet, though you are much closer to
developing weapons of mass destruction than Iraq. (You probably already
have a couple.) And you ask yourself, why is Saddam Hussein first in
line? He's no more a supporter of terrorism than you are: the Bush
administration hasn't produced any evidence of a Saddam-Al Qaeda
connection. Maybe the administration covets Iraq's oil reserves; but
it's also notable that of the three members of the axis of evil, Iraq
has by far the weakest military.

So you might be
tempted to conclude that the Bush administration is big on denouncing
evildoers, but that it can be deterred from actually attacking
countries it denounces if it expects them to put up a serious fight.
What was it Teddy Roosevelt said? Talk trash but carry a small stick?

Your own
experience seems to confirm that conclusion. Last summer you were
caught enriching uranium, which violates the spirit of your 1994
agreement with the Clinton administration. But the Bush administration,
though ready to invade Iraq at the slightest hint of a nuclear weapons
program, tried to play down the story, and its response — cutting off
shipments of fuel oil — was no more than a rap on the knuckles. In
fact, even now the Bush administration hasn't done what its predecessor
did in 1994: send troops to the region and prepare for a military
confrontation.

So here's how it probably looks from Pyongyang:

The Bush
administration says you're evil. It won't offer you aid, even if you
cancel your nuclear program, because that would be rewarding evil. It
won't even promise not to attack you, because it believes it has a
mission to destroy evil regimes, whether or not they actually pose any
threat to the U.S. But for all its belligerence, the Bush
administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are
militarily weak.

The incentives
for North Korea are clear. There's no point in playing nice — it will
bring neither aid nor security. It needn't worry about American efforts
to isolate it economically — North Korea hardly has any trade except
with China, and China isn't cooperating. The best self-preservation
strategy for Mr. Kim is to be dangerous. So while America is busy with
Iraq, the North Koreans should cook up some plutonium and build
themselves some bombs.

Again: What game does the Bush administration think it's playing?

What game does the NYTimes think it's playing? The first draft of this bit of history badly needs redrafting.

. . . Especially scary time for this considering these revelations about the Decider's current state of mind:

The President is mad, really, really mad according to the NY Daily News.
He and Laura thought things were going well after they exploited
"September the 11th" again. Now, between the Foley Republican child sex
predator scandal and the Woodward book "State of Denial," W is having a
melt-down:

Now, however, friends, aides and close political allies tell the Daily News Bush is furious
with his own side for helping create a political downdraft that has
blunted his momentum and endangered GOP prospects for keeping control
of Congress next month.

Some of his anger
is directed at former aides who helped Watergate journalist Bob
Woodward paint a lurid portrait of a dysfunctional, chaotic
administration in his new book, "State of Denial."

In the obsessively private Bush clan, talking out of school is the ultimate act of disloyalty, and Bush feels betrayed from within.

"He's ticked off big-time," said a well-informed source, "even if what they said was the truth."

The Daily News reports that "steam coming out of [Bush's] ears" over the Foley scandal.Our president sounds like he is coming unglued.

This post makes the case that the Foley revelations may mark a deep turning point for the GOP:

Red-state
women are the ones who have to deal most intimately with overentitled
authoritarian men who regard women as their property. They get to call
cops who will decline to take reports or refer for prosecution; face
down bosses who think that sexual access comes with the paycheck; and
live their lives in the company of men -- even those in their own
families who should know better -- who will do whatever it takes to
convince themselves that "I know him -- he'd never do that" and
besides, "she had it coming."

In this hostile environment, the
only defense a woman has is bind herself to the contract that defines
the conservative view of male-female relationships. She gives a man her
devotion and submission. In return, he promises to provide for and
protect her and her children -- even at the cost of his own life.
That's the honor code "traditional families" live by, and the only
safety women in authoritarian systems have.

These guys broke
that contract. Conservative women put their trust in guys like Hastert.
They gave him their devotion and support. According to the code, these
guys were honor-bound to put themselves on the line for the women and
children under their protective care. But when the bad guys came to
town -- the very same bad guys they'd been specifically hollering about
for decades as the number one reason that we all absolutely must submit to their protection -- our chicken-livered heroes were nowhere to be found.

You're doubtless familiar with the K Street Project, in which the GOP encouraged business groups to fire Dem lobbyists and replace them with Republicans; with the GOP's purging of Dems from the CIA; with the GOP's political requirements on working for the Coalition Provisional Authority; with the GOP's differential response to hurricane protection for blue and red areas; etc.

Now we learn that Republican, but not Democratic, congressional pages were warned against child sex predator ex-congressman Mark Foley. How disgusting is that?

Apparently the Washington establishment is washing its hands of the GOPs insanity, corruption, and chaos, and pushing for a return to sane (if of course always elitist!) policy. Watch Bob Woodward's brutal series of revelations on the flagship 60 minutes here: the Bush gang is revealed to be constantly lying to the public, totally self-deluded and out of touch, paralyzed by infighting and misplaced loyalty (viz Cheney's famous "gratitude" to his first boss, Rumsfeld), disconnected from the military, etc. Not like that's news to us of course. Certainly this sort of rhetorical fusillade against the Cheney adminstration has not been seen before in such a high profile setting, to my knowledge -- especially not from the author of the hagiographic and enabling Bush at War. Perhaps Woodward has recently started reading this blog.

HR 6054,
the 'Military Trials for Enemy Combatants' bill, is presently scheduled
to be brought before the House of Representatives. Certain Republican
senators and Bush had a minor tussle over whether, as Bush demanded,
the legislation would formally reinterpret U.S. compliance with the
Geneva Conventions. On the face of it, the compromise legislation
does not do this; however, there appear to be three clear routes to
reinterpreting such compliance: one legislative, one semi-legislative,
and one executive.

First, a legislative loophole. The present bill extends chapter 47
of title 10 of the U.S. Code to allow that the President or Secretary
of Defense (or those acting under their authority) may designate a
person an "enemy combatant" to be
tried by a military commission; the President may also establish such
commissions. One concern here is that the definition of "enemy
combatant" is worded so that its targeted designees might very well not count as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions:

The definition of Lawful Enemy Combatant
diverges substantially from the Geneva Convention III Article 4 (for
example, "regular forces" vs
"armed forces") definitions for a Prisoner of War, thus restricting the
domestic law position as to the applicability of the Geneva Convention
to covered groups. The effect is to return to a pre-Geneva Conventions
standard of the kind described by Justice Thomas in his dissent in Hamdan, and implicitly the harsh treatment accorded such persons pre-1949.

Somewhat tempering this concern is the explicit recognition that a military commission is "a regularly constituted court,
affording all the necessary ‘judicial guarantees which are recognized
as indispensable by civilized peoples’ for purposes of common Article 3
of the Geneva Conventions", which among other things forbids (subsection 1(a)) "Violence to life and person, in particular
murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture" and (subsection 1(c)) "Outrages
upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading
treatment" .

So far, so good, until you get
to the part where conformity with Article 3 is defined:

IN
GENERAL.—Satisfaction of the prohibitions against cruel, inhuman,
and degrading treatment set forth in section 1003 of the Detainee
Treatment Act of 2005 (42 U.S.C. 2000dd) shall fully satisfy United
States obligations with respect to the standards for detention and
treatment established by section 1 of Common Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions, with the exception of the obligations imposed by subsections 1(b) and 1(d) of such Article.

That is to say, conformity to the prohibitions stated in subsections 1(a) and 1(c) (cited above) is interpreted as per the relevant section of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (sponsored by John McCain). So, what standards for conformity does that act impose? Answer: the standards provided by the Army Field Manual on Interrogation, long serving as a fairly constrained basis for interrogation operations, which Rumsfeld and others had discarded on the way to Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

One problem with basing conformity to the Geneva Conventions on the
Field Manual is that the the Manual has long required that
interrogation techniques conform
to the Geneva Conventions. But the larger problem is that, as McCain acknowledged,
the Act "would not set the Field Manual in stone – it could be changed
at any time".
Indeed, one month after McCain introduced the legislation Rumsfeld
announced that the manual would be rewritten by the Pentagon; the
revision scheduled for release this past spring contained 10 classified
pages in the interrogation techniques section, and moreover
specifically elided
various proscriptions from Article 3 of the Geneva Convention (not,
presumably, in order to avoid HR 6054's being circular). Thankfully,
the State Department and other factions put up sufficient resistance to
the proposal that it was scrapped in favor of a new version
(not yet released) according to which "All detainees will be treated
consistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention" (so says an
unnamed military official, anyway). Still, the concern remains that
since the Manual is not "set in stone", HR 6054's standards of
conformity to the Geneva Conventions could end up being such as to
clearly abrogate the conventions.

Second, a semi-legislative loophole. Upon approving the Detainee
Treatment Act (tagged on as an amendment to a Defense Appropriations
Bill), Bush issued one of his infamous signing statements, stating

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act,
relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional
authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch
and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional
limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the
shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title
X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

Title X specifically covers Section 1003
(named in HR 6054 as setting the standards of conformity to the Geneva
Conventions). Signing statements arguably impact the interpretation and implementation of the associated legislation:

Rather than veto laws passed by Congress, Bush
is using his signing statements to effectively nullify them as they
relate to the executive branch. These statements, for him, function as
directives to executive branch departments and agencies as to how they
are to implement the relevant law.

Hence
even supposing the Field Manual retains formal conformity to the Geneva
Conventions, HR 6054's conformity to these Conventions as per the
"Detainee Treatment Act" may ultimately be subject to Bush's (more
generally, executive) reinterpretation.

On to the third, directly executive, loophole. In any case Bush evidently intends to ignore any limits that might be set by (a proper understanding of) the Geneva Conventions:

The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear
yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and
abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own
interpretation of
the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on
questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices
as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation.
Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his
authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them
to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from
prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who
in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.

Perhaps
one form of such an "executive order" will take the form of a signing
statement, assuming HR 6054 is passed. The upshot of this and the
previous loopholes:

In effect, the agreement means that U.S. violations of international
human rights law can continue as long as Mr. Bush is president, with
Congress's tacit assent.

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was
missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and
instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in
his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered
Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a
kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make
to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture
and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now
that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John
McCain's amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that
the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing
and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes
enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes
more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

This
is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent
the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject.
Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest
scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it).
Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture
upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it
all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but
long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia
had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security
apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of
any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and
other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot
pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of
their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they
have a "ticking bomb" case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter
trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a
good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he
be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring
patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating
one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people
leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues
with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a
playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious
NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of
butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the
simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even
Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the
fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman,
Nikolai Yezhov (Beria's predecessor), to be arrested together with his
closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of
the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian
monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that
even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve
intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it?
Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a
certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the
American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know
that if Vice President Cheney
is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading" (CID) treatment
of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then
the war is lost already.

Even talking about the possibility of
using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts
in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their
superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the
"treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a
distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone
are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed
in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the
mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after
night after night. Or how about the "Chekist's handshake" so widely
practiced under Stalin -- a firm squeeze of the victim's palm with a
simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very
simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp
without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an
excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it
appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay
captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method
that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin's
"show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a
prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink
of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even
understanding what he had signed.

I know from my own experience
that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of
wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it
is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able
to look into a mirror. But if I don't, my interrogator will suffer
equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle.
This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly
forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact
definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?

But if we
cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your
young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For
scarred they will be, take my word for it.

In 1971, while in
Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went
on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB
wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most
inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they
had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding
me in a very unusual manner -- through my nostrils. About a dozen
guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they
straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would
not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was
pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was
thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing
out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until
the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I
could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor
out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man -- my lungs felt ready to
burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept
shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my
stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop
through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up.
They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed
by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the
pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for
everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the
morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could
stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were
around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it
straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It'll be quicker for you, too,
you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to
go to jail because of you lot? No, I can't do that. . . . " And so they
stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out
of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run
out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those
guards could ever look me in the eye again.

Today, when the White
House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow
of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that
they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your
armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in
CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will
become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very
least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.

If America's
leaders want to hunt terrorists while transforming dictatorships into
democracies, they must recognize that torture, which includes CID, has
historically been an instrument of oppression -- not an instrument of
investigation or of intelligence gathering. No country needs to invent
how to "legalize" torture; the problem is rather how to stop it from
happening. If it isn't stopped, torture will destroy your nation's
important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East. And if you
cynically outsource torture to contractors and foreign agents, how can
you possibly be surprised if an 18-year-old in the Middle East casts a
jaundiced eye toward your reform efforts there?

Finally, think
what effect your attitude has on the rest of the world, particularly in
the countries where torture is still common, such as Russia, and where
its citizens are still trying to combat it. Mr. Putin will be the first
to say: "You see, even your vaunted American democracy cannot defend
itself without resorting to torture. . . . "

Off we go, back to the caves.

Vladimir
Bukovsky, who spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and
psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, is the
author of several books, including "To Build a Castle" and "Judgment in
Moscow." Now 63, he has lived primarily in Cambridge, England, since
1976.

America's leaders "must recognize that torture [. . .] has historically been an instrument of oppression -- not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering" -- indeed they must.

The 13 Sep Weekly Standard reported Bush's "heads up" that two "interesting indicators" undermine predictions that the Dems take congress: in Bush's view, "these elections will come down to two things: one, firm belief that in
order to win the war on terror there must be a comprehensive strategy
that recognizes this war is being fought on more than one front, and,
two, the economy". On the latter, he noted that gas prices are coming down. About the "comprehensive strategy" for fighting the "war on terror" on "more than one front", Bush was less specific. Whatever he had up his sleeve, this interesting post makes a plausible case that it is more than a "bluff".

The loathesome Rove has also been promising his buds an "October Surprise" to help win the elections.

Now, apparently, the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower, "bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles", and its supporting "attack group" of ships, has been issued orders that would put it on schedule to launch bombs on Iran on 21 October:

Colonel Gardiner, who has taught military strategy at the National War
College, says that the carrier deployment and a scheduled Persian Gulf
arrival date of October 21 is "very important evidence" of war
planning. He says, "I know that some naval forces have already received
'prepare to deploy orders' [PTDOs], which have set the date for being
ready to go as October 1. Given that it would take about from October 2
to October 21 to get those forces to the Gulf region, that looks about
like the date" of any possible military action against Iran. (A PTDO
means that all crews should be at their stations, and ships and planes
should be ready to go, by a certain date--in this case, reportedly, October
1.) Gardiner notes, "You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for
very long. It's a very significant order, and it's not done as a
training exercise." This point was also made in the Time article.

So what is the White House planning?

On Monday President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly at its
opening session, and while studiously avoiding even physically meeting
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was also addressing the body, he
offered a two-pronged message. Bush told the "people of Iran" that
"we're working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis" and that he
looked forward "to the day when you can live in freedom." But he also
warned that Iran's leaders were using the nation's resources "to fund
terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons." Given the
President's assertion that the nation is fighting a "global war on
terror" and that he is Commander in Chief of that "war," his prominent
linking of the Iran regime with terror has to be seen as a deliberate
effort to claim his right to carry the fight there. Bush has repeatedly
insisted that the 2001 Congressional Authorization for the Use of Force
that preceded the invasion of Afghanistan was also an authorization for
an unending "war on terror."

It seems pretty clear what the "October surprise" is to be.

I wonder how this will play with the US public. Plausibly, there's pretty serious war fatigue, so this might just backfire. But I can't find any polling data about this.

As per this WaPo article,
more than 80 percent of voters will use
electronic voting machines in the Nov 7 election, with a third of all
precincts using the technology for the first time. The massive switch
to e-voting machines was initiated by the Help America Vote Act,
supposedly in order to prevent the sort of problems plaguing the 2000
Florida recount debacle, involving hanging chads and the like. But
such systems are prone to new and horrible technical difficulties, of
the sort characterizing last week's "debacle" in Maryland (see here for details).

So,
TJ became convinced that it was all right to upload the memory card,
which he did. And there, on the central tabulator screen, appeared the
altered results: Seven "Yes" votes and one "No" vote, with absolutely
no evidence that anything had been altered. It was a powerful moment
and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of
causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last
thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I
cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried
because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were
every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so
unjustly attacked as "conspiracy theorists" and "technophobes" when
Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election
results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because
it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been,
as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who
are producing electronic voting machines that can change election
results without detection.

Long-time readers of this of this blog are familiar with Brian's series of posts on the probability of a US military draft: the war plans of the Cheney administration -- which it seems determined to carry out -- it would seem, can't be pushed any further without additional forces.

However, thesetwo posts indicate a frightening loophole: who needs manpower to subjugate say, Iran, when you can nuke them instead?

[Bush] has been consistent from the earliest days of his regime -
consistently incompetent, delusional, and violent. He does not bluff.
He does exactly what he wants to do. And there is nothing he wants more
right now than to use nukes on Iran. It's not merely because he's a kid
with a cool popgun, but one shouldn't misunderestimate his
impulsiveness and immaturity. It's also because he, and the other
rightwing lunatics genuinely believe that since 1945, liberals have
severely crippled America by making such a big deal out of nukes. By
all means, check out Curtis Lemay's "America is in Danger" for an
historical example (late 60's) of this delusion. How are we crippled?
Well, according to them, by refusing to use nukes, America fights
bloody prolonged conflicts that are difficult to conclude with decisive
victories.

Bush and his pals wants to save America from
liberals that will once again deny America a critical victory, crucial
to its safety and security. Bush wants to break the nuclear taboo.

I gleaned a pretty good sense of long-term right-wing dogma from years of reading the National Review, American Spectator, Human Events, and other such birdcage liners -- Cheney admin policy seems designed to actualize many of the therein articulated crazed fantasies. Why not this madness as well?

I don't know who Matt Lauer is, but in the video clip linked here, you can see him in the unenviable position of interviewing Bush at literally less than two feet distance. Bush -- utterly predictably -- comes off as an unbelievably aggressive asshole, getting in Lauer's grill, interrupting, condescending, waving his arms around, and opening up several cans of good old "let me finish!". That looked pretty unpleasant for Lauer -- at one point he waves his uncapped sharpie around to get Bush to back off. (By contrast, compare this tale of today's blogger klatch with the Big Dog.) Too bad the ruler of the US is a fucking sociopath.

Apparently Martin Peretz, owner and e-i-c of the New Republic since 1975, and chief insider of the neoliberal/hawkish/center-right "Democratic Leadership Council", has just been named to the advisory board of the defense fund for traitor and uber-Cheney Admin insider Lewis Libby.

(Moreover, the document linked to answers the question How the hell is Bush going to get away with giving a speech at the WTC site? Won't he be howled down by thousands of furious angry New Yorkers? Wide-angle photos from the event reveal the bizarre---if, I suppose, predictable---truth: the WTC site had been cleared of all life during the speech aside from Bush, Mrs Bush, and their marine escort. [Of course, they also show without saying the presence of some kind of press section . . .])

I'd been wondering why Bush suddenly announced trials for the Gitmo 14 -- now I know.

Just as Rove pulled out the 2002 midterms by forcing the legislature into the Iraq war, apparently he plans to pull out the 2006 by forcing them to accelerate the US's drive toward the police state. Now that's synergy!

Readers of the major blogs will have seen this connection by now, but it's worth highlighting in this forum since it involves two of the betes noires on this blog -- apparently 'Path to 9/11' was put together by an amalgam of two right-wing Hollywood mole groups, one run by David Horowitz, another by elements of the Christianist movement.

Poor ABC/Disney, on the other hand, appear to have "Punk'd" -- inadequate oversight, together with an underestimation of the bile the right is capable of, allowed the right wing to use ABC as its bullhorn, with probable damages both reputational (that Disney broadcast right wing propaganda directly before and intended to influence an election will be remembered for the next century, harming their clean-Gene reputation with the public and, as noted in the just cited piece, undermining their copyright lobbying, which relies on some presumption of responsible stewardship) and financial (see immediately below).

That's median income, folks. Despite the fact that the economy has been growing at a slow but consistent rate, median income has been dropping in nearly every state, in some cases, quite dramatically -- in excess of 10% (!) in five states. Obviously, there has been a tremendous looting of the great majority of Americans by the ultra rich, who not only have absorbed all that economic growth for themselves, but are actually *taking away* the small gains made since the early seventies. Indeed, we have heard for years that incomes have barely risen since then, but now it seems quite likely that under Bush, we have seen an absolute income drop, returning to the levels of the 1960s.

I suspect that many readers of this blog are professionals, who regard steadily increasing income as a given. Can you imagine if you had to take a 10% income cut? This is stark, terribly bad economic news: most of America is effectively living through an economic depression.

EROSI? A fiend? I am a soldier of our planet! I? A fiend? We did not come here as enemies. We came only with friendly intentions. To talk. To ask your aid.

COL. EDWARDSOur aid?

EROSYes. Your aid for the whole universe. But your governments of Earth refused even to accept our existence. Even though you've seen us, heard our messages, you still refused to accept us.

COL. EDWARDSWhy is it so important that you want to contact the governments of our Earth?

EROSBecause of death. Because all you of Earth are idiots!

JEFFNow you just hold on, Buster.

EROSNo you hold on. First was your firecracker, a harmless explosive. Then your handgrenade. They began to kill your own people a few at a time. Then the bomb, then a larger bomb. Many people are killed at one time. Then your scientists stumbled upon the atom bomb. Split the atom. Then the hydrogen bomb, where you actually explode the air itself. Now you will make a bomb that brings the destruction of the entire universe, served by our sun. The only explosion left is the solaronite.

COL. EDWARDSWhy there's no such thing.

EROSPerhaps to you. But we've known it for centuries. Your scientists will stumble upon it as they have all the others. But the juvenile minds you possess will not comprehend its strength, until it's too late.

COL. EDWARDSYou're way above our heads.

EROSThe solaronite is a way to explode the actual particles of sunlight.

COL. EDWARDSWhy that's impossible.

EROSEven now, your scientists are working on a way to harness the sun's rays. The rays of sunlight are minute particles. Is it so far from your imagination they cannot do as I have suggested?

COL. EDWARDSWhy a particle of sunlight can't even be seen or measured.

EROSCan you see or measure an atom? Yet you can explode one. A ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms.

JEFFSo what if we do develop this solaronite bomb? We'd be even a stronger nation than now.

The enormous increase in agricultural productivity since WWII may have run its course---but increase in population hasn't, and we're beginning to see the very frightening consequences:

Food supplies are shrinking alarmingly around the globe, plunging
the world into its greatest crisis for more than 30 years. New figures
show that this year's harvest will fail to produce enough to feed
everyone on Earth, for the sixth time in the past seven years. Humanity
has so far managed by eating its way through stockpiles built up in
better times - but these have now fallen below the danger level.

Food prices have already started to rise as a result, and threaten to
soar out of reach of many of the 4.2 billion people who live in the
world's most vulnerable countries. And the new "green" drive to get
cars to run on biofuels threatens to make food even scarcer and more
expensive.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the US
Department of Agriculture (USDA), which produce the world's two main
forecasts of the global crop production, both estimate that this year's
grain harvest will fall for the second successive year.

[. . .]

The world's food stocks have shrunk from enough to feed the world for
116 days in 1999 to a predicted 57 days at the end of this season, well
below the official safety level. Prices have already risen by up to 20
per cent this year.

[. . .]

Between 1950 and 1990 grain yields more than doubled, but
they have grown much more slowly since. Production rose from around 630
million tons to 1.78 billion tons, but has only edged up in the past 15
years, to around 2 billion tons.

"The near-tripling of the harvest by the world's farmers was a
remarkable performance," says Brown. "In a single generation they
increased grain production by twice as much as had been achieved during
the preceding 11,000 years, since agriculture began. But now the world
has suffered a dramatic loss of momentum."

Apart from increasing yields, there has always been one other way of
boosting production - putting more land under the plough. But this,
too, has been running into the buffers. As population grows and
farmland is used for building roads and cities - and becomes exhausted
by overuse - the amount available for each person on Earth has fallen
by more than half.

There are more than five people on Earth today for every two living
in the middle of the last century. Yet enough is produced worldwide to
feed everyone well, if it is evenly distributed.

It is not just that people in rich countries eat too much, and those
in poor ones eat too little. Enormous quantities of the world's
increasingly scarce grain now goes to feed cows - and, indirectly, cars.

The cows are longstanding targets of Brown's, who founded the
prestigious Worldwatch Institute immediately after the 1974 conference,
partly to draw attention to the precariousness of food supplies. As
people become better-off, they eat more meat, the animals that are
slaughtered often being fed on grain. It takes 14kg of grain to produce
2kg of beef, and 8kg of grain for 2kg of pork. More than a third of the
world's harvest goes to fatten animals in this way.

Cars are a new concern, the worry arising from the present drive to
produce green fuels to fight global warming. A "corn rush" has erupted
in the United States, using the crop to produce the biofuel, ethanol -
strongly supported by subsidies from the Bush administration to divert
criticism of its failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Just a single fill of ethanol for a four-wheel drive SUV, says
Brown, uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. This
year the amount of US corn going to make the fuel will equal what it
sells abroad; traditionally its exports have helped feed 100 - mostly
poor - countries.

From next year, the amount used to run American cars will exceed
exports, and soon it is likely to reduce what is available to help feed
poor people overseas. The number of ethanol plants built or planned in
the corn-belt state of Iowa will use virtually all the state's crop.

This will not only cut food supplies, but drive up the process of
grain, making hungry people compete with the owners of gas-guzzlers.
Already spending 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, they
simply cannot afford to do so.

Brown expects the food crisis to get much worse as more and more
land becomes exhausted, soil erodes, water becomes scarcer, and global
warming cuts harvests.